Online business as the name implies, is simply any legal
means by which you offer value to individuals, organizations or companies in
exchange for money via the internet. Income can be earned either from individuals paying you for the services you
render to them or from companies paying you via commissions for the services
you render to them. No matter the channel of earning, the most important thing
is to earn sustainably. Some online business takes a long time (6 to 12 months)
for reasonable profits to start coming in while some others takes little time
(2 to 5 months). Below are few examples of online businesses that can be very
rewarding.
1. Affiliate Marketing
2. Information
Marketing
3. Pay-per-Click
Programs (e.g Google Adsense) etc
4.
Blogging
Affiliate
marketing: This is a system of online business where you get registered with a
company or organization online to promote their products by referring people to
their website through a personalized URL or link that will be given to you upon
registration. Although, the earning pattern varies with different companies
i.e. commission per person invited who buys their products varies with
different companies. The major challenge people often face is how to get a good number of buyers which will require some form of advertising. Your earnings is a function
of how many buyers you are able to send to them. Some of these companies
pay through means which are not favorable to Nigerians.This implies that you have consider the payment solution before you join any affiliate program.
Information marketing: This aspect of online business
involves the selling of information packaged in the form eBooks, DVDs or video.
Information marketing is one of the most profitable forms of online business. You
can either create your own product or sign up as an affiliate to someone else’s
product. Setting up an info business online might be a little bit challenging
for newbies, but once completed, it will just require little time input. One piece
of information can be sold over and over again. No wonder some people describe
it as “work once and get paid forever”. It requires little start up capital
which will be mostly required for advertisement. Many Nigerians have made goodmoney from info marketing and are still making it.
Pay-per-Click Programs (e.g Google Adsense): This is a
program organized by online advertising agencies. People forward their adverts
at certain rates to these advertising agencies and these agencies through their
program give out these adverts to qualified website owners so that when people
visit these websites and click on those adverts, the website owners gets a
commission. The commission increases as the clicks on those adverts increases
and the commission per click can range from N5 to N200. This can be very
rewarding financially. Some website owners in Nigeria rake in as much as
N500,000 per month from this program. Success here lies on getting good traffic
to your website. One of the most popular advertising agencies is Google and
their program is called Adsense.
Blogging: A blog is a type of website that is usually
updated with fresh information or articles so as to make the readers to visit
the website on a regular basis. The act of doing this is called blogging and
the person who does it is called a blogger. A blog can focus any subject so
long as there are substantial numbers of people that will be interested in the
subject. Making money through a blog can be either by Pay-per-Click Programs or
via affiliate marketing or both.
Although there are other means of making money online like
domain packing, website flipping, data entry jobs, email processing job etc but
the ones listed above have higher potentials for success and are more
marketable and sustainable. Data entry and email processing jobs has been infiltrated by
scammers thereby making it difficult to identify a genuine one.
